I've been trying to keep up with the Landes/Frank discussion while (like most of us) doing 15 other things, and so have kept postponing joining in; but now I can't help myself. I write from a serious disadvantage, not yet having read Landes, but much of the discussion seems to stand on its own.(posted 8757 days ago)First, I think Frank's work, my own work and that of various others whom Jack Goldstone calls the "California school" does make it seem very likely that the "great divergence" is a post-1750 phenomenon, perhaps even a post 1800 one; at least I think the burden of proof would now lie with those who think it came earlier. It may well be, as Alan Taylor suggests, that this shorter time frame makes the "European miracle" harder to explain than if we saw it slowly emerging since 1000, but so be it; I think it is the task we have nonetheless.
Greg Clark asks how we can explain the huge size of the gap circa 1900 if it had only been growing for 150 years or so. Various possibilities come to mind, including 1)that the higher estimates of British growth during the "Industrial Revolution" may turn out to be not far off after all; and 2)that not only was Britain/Europe growing rapidly during the 19th century, but China -- or at least many parts of it -- were actually going through a pretty significant decline. Most of my estimates of per capita consumption ca. 1750 in China are in fact, considerably higher than ca. 1900, and in at least one important area -- cotton cloth -- I think a good case can be made for almost no change in absolute levels of output, or even a slight decline, over a period in which population doubled.Nor do we lack for explanations of such a decline in 19th century China. There was a serious breakdown in government, at least in mid-century, with massive civil wars, and serious decay of some important public infrastructure (especially, though not exclusively for water control). Opium, still a fairly trivial problem in 1750, became an astonishingly widespread problem during the 19th century. Estimates of the amount of opium produced and imported ca. 1900 might have been enough to supply as many as 40,000,000 addicts. Third, and seemingly independently, there seems to have been a breakdown in some regions (though not all) of the micro-level social structures that in other Chinese times and places were central to the operation of preventive checks on population, leading to very rapid, ecologically disastrous population growth in these regions (especially North China) -- and to a contraction of the crucial streams of cheap primary products (rice, timber, raw cotton) that these regions had previously exported to china's richest areas. Moreover, as the population of these poorer regions grew much faster than that in wealthier regions, they further depressed Chinese averages.
None of this, however, changes the fact that Europe (or at least Northwestern Europe) underwent an astonishing growth spurt in this period, which we still need to explain. If we define "institutions" broadly enough, then an explanation of this spurt in terms of "superior institutions" becomes almost tautological: the only alternative to it would be to say it was all a matter of luck or (which amounts to the same thing) Europeans riding the wave of developments that were really centered elsewhere. And while I do think global processes deserve more attention than they usually get, they aren't the whole story.
But if "superior institutions" is to be a meaningful answer, it needs to be broken down considerably. What were European institutions better for? Reducing transactions costs? Encouraging technological innovation? Plundering others? Developing human capital? We need some ways of assessing these possibilities, assessing the impact of "superiority" in each area in which it might have existed, and assessing the impact of those things that do fall outside the bounds of even a broad definition of institutions (e.g. resource endowments).
When it comes to lowering transaction costs, I'm dubious about overall European superiority before the breakdown of public order in mid-19th century China. Chinese land markets were remarkably active and in many ways less restricted than those in Europe; a similar case could also be made for labor markets, and for at least some product markets (both the degree of price integration and the scale of product flows in china's long-distance grain trade, for instance, would compare quite well with anything int he Atlantic world before It is however, probably important that a lot of European inferiorities in these areas get erased at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, as guilds, common land, etc., were vastly reduced by French Revolutionary and Napoleonic-era reforms on much of the continent. And as these deficits disappeared, one area in which European institutions probably were much better at keeping transaction costs down -- namely financial markets-- became much more important. As technological and other changes created various economic sectors in which firms needed large sums of relatively patient capital, which exceeded the capital-raising abilities of families and other sorts of personal networks(first, perhaps in railroads, then in a whole set of industries affected by Chandler's managerial revolution) institutions like the corporation became quite important. Previously this institutional form, however clever, had been of limited importance for anything besides extra-continental trade and colonization. And the sophistication of European public finance -- which had exceeded that of China (though I'm not so sure about India) for quite a while, became much more significant as states a)began to do more things that could be beneficial to the economy, rather than spending almost all the money they raise don war- making and b)extended their war-making (with the aid of new weapons) to continental Asia, making China's relative weakness in public finance far more important than it had been when the Empire's only serious external rivals ( various steppe and NE Asian tribal groups) had been people who had still less of a system for drawing on future state revenues. Add together European catch-up in areas where it had been behind, the expanded importance of one area where it had long been ahead, and the spectacular if temporary collapse of public order in mid-19th century China and one can see a significant role for "institutional superiority" in lowering transaction costs during "the great divergence" without having to posit that this superiority came from a gap that had long been growing.
The question of promoting technological change (in part by encouraging science) seems like the best case for a slowly maturing Western European advantage -- Margaret Jacob's work on the culture of science in Britain, for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. But even here, we are talking about a post-1500 development, not a post- 1000 one. Moreover, it's relationship to the Industrial Revolution (at least in its early stages) remains, I think, pretty controversial -- certainly there were people using Newtonian mechanics to calculate how much power they'd get out of a new water wheel, but there were also a lot of crucial advances that seem to have been fairly distant from science. Moreover, we should remember that Europe was not ahead in all important areas, even as late as 1800 -- and that which technological advantages turned out to be crucial and which relatively unimportant depended on a lot of things. Thus, Europe remained relatively backward in agricultural yields per acre even in 1800 (though the potato was helping it close some of that gap) -- and that particular bit of backwardness might have mattered a lot more had it not been for the existence of a)parts of Europe, which, thanks to rather rigid institutions, had not participated nearly as much in the post 1450 expansion (either in output or in population growth) as the most advanced parts of Europe, or many parts of China, and thus still had relatively large amounts of land per capita (something Frank emphasizes as a European "advantage of backwardness) and b)had Europe also not had, due to a combination of skills, luck (especially in the form of epidemics) and ruthlessness, the Americas as a place to which to send 50,000,000 people over the next century, and from which to export staggering quantities of primary products (something which I have contrasted with the very different relationships between China's most advanced regions and its peripheries, most of which were rapidly filling up by the late 18th/early 19th century). And for all that European technology advanced a long a broad front in this period, I wonder how much many of these clever innovations would have mattered had it not been for the fundamental coal/steam engine breakthrough in Britain -- one which took plenty of knowledge to be sure (though it should be noted that both the Chinese and the Indians, and probably others, had all the basic science you needed for a steam engine), but also depended, as I have argued elsewhere, on the fortunate location of large coal deposits near the crucial market and artisanal center of London (which both enabled and encouraged the very inefficient and awkward first steam engines, useful only for pumping out mines,into something vastly more important). By contrast, virtually all of China's coal was hundreds of land-locked miles from the markets and artisanal talents of the Lower Yangzi, Lingnan, and Southeast Coast. Moreover, the problem in these mines was not water that needed to be pumped out, but, on the contrary, such severe aridity that explosions were happening all the time. So while there were limited incentives to try shake Chinese coal mining (by this time a rather backward sector) out of its torpor, the Chinese instead dealt with fuel shortages through the diffusion of extremely efficient stoves, a very far-flung timber trade, the use of crop residues (and finding ways of preventing that diversion of residues from impoverishing the soil) and so on -- all quite clever, too, but not part of a path that would lead either to the fundamental break with dependence on annual flows of solar energy that England's fossil fuel breakthrough represented, or the tremendous iron/steel boom, or the clever idea of putting the steam engine on a set of tracks to solve transport problems, etc. The point is not that Europe was "just lucky," by any means, but that a lot of things are involved in determining which technological advantages/disadvantages opened a world of self-sustaining growth (or foreclosed it) and which led to incremental improvements (or the lack of them) but no great transformation. In this regard, I'm somewhat dubious of Landes' apparent stress (I'm still getting his argument second hand, so I may be being unfair) on clocks and spectacles. It's true, Europeans were the world's leaders in both these areas (as far as I know) by the 18th century, but Chinese made remarkably good copies of both (see Needham, for instance, on the very high quality of cuckoo clocks based on European models but made in places like Suzhou and Hangzhou --if the point is that the skills developed in making these gadgets developed a reservoir of skills in making complex gear systems, etc., which had broader application, the extremely elaborate jackwork of these gadgets should establish that this was no European monopoly.) Assertions of blanket technological superiority still seem shaky to me, even near the end of the 18th century: and when we try to figure out which kinds of technological superiority mattered, we get a series of path-dependent stories in which scientific knowledge and artisanal cleverness per se often don't seem to me the most important factors.
As far as having institutions for developing human capital, is concerned, it seems to me one would have to grant a Western European and North American advantage by sometime in the mid-19th century, with the spread of public education and so on. But at least so far, I don't see strong evidence of a clear advantage that kicks in early enough to explain the beginnings of the great divergence.
Finally, we get to exploiting other parts of the world, at which Europeans clearly did excel. Clearly, this story cannot be reduced to "Europeans were nastier, or better at being nasty," and I don't think people who point to this factor generally mean to do so: effectively exploiting the new World in particular involved navigational skills, joint-stock companies, etc., along with plenty of violence, good luck with geography and germs, and a peculiar political economy (a bunch of relatively equal states almost constantly at war with each other) which quite likely did more harm than good within Europe's own boundaries, but created big benefits for Europe insofar as it encouraged overseas expansion. (Not to mention the irony that the buoyancy of Chinese silver demand had much to do with keeping the price high enough to make the first couple of centuries of European presence in the New World sustainable in the first place: take away that demand, as Dennis Flynn and others have shown, and the slide in silver's value would have been so rapid in the 16th century that Spanish administration in the New world would have become a money loser within a few decades.) Again, the point is not to "bash Europe" and say that the post-1750 miracle can be reduced to luck and ruthlessness, or that it can be explained entirely based on post-1750 developments: I would certainly agree with Brad DeLong that we don't want to make the "Rostow error" of thinking that just because we can't see big divergences until the last couple hundred years there weren't some pretty important differences that go back further. The point is, I think, that those differences cut both ways, so that only at the very end does it become clear that one place is headed for something much better than the other; indeed what might have seemed like advantages at one point (e.g the more or less free land and labor markets in china's hinterlands, as opposed to the many growth- slowing institutions in much of continental Europe) could be disadvantages later. Moreover, this eventual result depends on complex interactions involving many factors that neither Europeans nor Chinese could have predicted or controlled. So by all means, let's look for stories that place the 19th century in the context of much longer regional trajectories,as Landes does...